Quotes About Decision-making

When should we try to fix and when should we not?

It is a reality of medicine that choosing to not do something—to not order a test, to not give an antibiotic, to not take a patient to the operating room—is far harder than choosing to do it.

and you will find that the larger, starker, and more painful difficulty is the still abundant uncertainty that exists over what should be done in many situations.

You count on experience and judgment. And it is hard not to be troubled by this.

It is affected by the order in which information is presented and how problems are framed.

Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at night.

Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters.

The problem with not having anybody to tell you what to do, I understood, is that there was nobody to tell you what not to do.

Morality is a code of black and white. When and if men attempt a compromise, it is obvious which side will necessarily lose and which will necessarily profit.

If you want my advice, Peter, you've made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?

I am not brave enough to be a coward, she said. I see the consequences too clearly

Well, whose opinion did you take?" "I don't ask for opinions." "What do you go by?" "Judgment." "Well, whose judgment did you take?" "Mine." "But whom did you consult about it?" "Nobody.

If you want my advice, Peter," he said at last, "you've made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?

Mrs. Martin, I happen to be committed to a course of action. That does not mean I don't care whether the action is good or bad.

Make a list of pros and cons and allow it to marinate for a few days. Gradually jettison the entries that equal each other—canceling out multiple arguments that amount to a single one in weight—and endorse the column in which a balance remains.

You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it's really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.

Ahora es cuando debes aprender a distinguir las cosas importantes de las que no lo son. En

Scrutinise three times; act once. Young people don't always grasp this. Being slow and faultless is better than being quick and final.

Just as some historians seemed more shocked that the author of the Declaration of Independence had sex with Sally Hemmings than by the fact that he owned her, Clinton received far more censure for his sexual misdeeds than for other moral lapses, such as his politically motivated decision to ignore the finding of a bipartisan panel that issuing needles to drug addicts would save lives and curtail the spread of AIDS without increasing drug addiction.

Categories are how we make sense of the world and communicate our ideas to others. But we are such categorization machines that we often see categories where none exist. That warps our view of the world and our decision-making suffers.

I don't know if it's good or bad. I don't know if it's better to have your kids be happy and not go to college. I don't know if it's better to be close with your daughter or make sure that she has a better life than you do. I just don't know.

The fate of our country is now in the hands of people who don't think about what they want until they get right up to the register at McDonald's.

Democracy is built on the simplest premise that has ever supported a political system, that a majority of the voters will be right more often than they are wrong.

Anything less than a conscious commitment to the important is an unconscious commitment to the unimportant.